―At night, everything becomes transparent, or insubstantial.‖ Reaching out, she touched their reflections in the window. ―And yet our thoughts—and why is it especially our fears?—are somehow magnified, taking on the proportions of titans, or gods.‖ She stood very close to him, her voice lowered almost to a whisper. ―Are we good or evil? What‘s really in our hearts? It‘s dispiriting when we don‘t know, or can‘t decide.‖
―Perhaps we‘re both good and evil,‖ Bourne said, wondering about himself, about all his identities, and where the truth lay, ―depending on the time and the circumstance.‖
Arkadin was lost in the star-dazzled Azerbaijani night. Starting promptly at five in the morning, he and his one-hundred-strong cadre of hardened soldiers had hiked into the mountains. Their mission, he‘d told them, was to find the snipers hiding along their route and shoot them with the long-range paintball guns that looked and felt exactly like AK-47s that had been shipped at his request to Nagorno-Karabakh. Twenty members of the indigenous tribe, equipped with paintball sniper rifles, had secreted themselves along the route. When Arkadin had handed them out, he‘d had to explain their use to men who thought them both amusing and idiotic. Still, within half an hour the tribesmen had become proficient with the pseudo-weapons.
His men had missed the first two snipers completely, so two of the hundred had been ―killed‖ before they hunkered down and learned from their inattention and lapses in judgment.
This exercise had lasted all day and into the swiftly falling dusk, but Arkadin drove them on, deeper and deeper into the mountains. They stopped once for fifteen minutes, to eat their rations, then it was on again, climbing ever upward toward the clear, shining vault of heaven.
Toward midnight, he called a completion to the exercise, graded each man as to performance, stamina, and ability to adapt to a changing situation, then allowed them to make camp. As usual, he ate little and slept not at all.
He could feel his body‘s aches and strains, but they were small and, it seemed to him, very far away, as if they belonged to someone else, or to a different Arkadin he knew only in passing.
Dawn had arrived before he stilled his feverishly working mind and, marshaling his energies, pulled out his satellite phone and punched in a specific set of numbers, connecting him to an automated ―zombie‖ line that switched his call several times. With each switch, he was required to punch in a different code, which allowed him to continue the call. At length, after the last code was digested by the closed system at the other end of the line, he heard a human voice.
―I didn‘t expect to hear from you.‖ There was no rebuke in Nikolai Yevsen‘s voice, only a faint curiosity.
―Frankly,‖ Arkadin said, ―I didn‘t expect to call.‖ His head tilted up, he was staring at the last stars as they were banished by the pink and blue light. ―Something has come to my attention I thought you should know.‖
―As always, I appreciate your thoughtfulness.‖ Yevsen‘s voice was as harsh as a saw cutting through metal. There was about it something feral, a fearsome kind of power that was his alone.
―It has come to my attention that the woman, Tracy Atherton, is not alone.‖
―How is this information of interest to me?‖
Only Yevsen, Arkadin thought, could convey a lethal stillness with the mere tone of his voice. In the course of his freelance career with the Moscow grupperovkahe had gotten to know the arms dealer well enough to be exceedingly wary of him.
―She‘s with a man named Jason Bourne,‖ he said now, ―who is out for revenge.‖
―We all are, in one way or another. Why would he seek it here?‖
―Bourne thinks you hired the Torturer to kill him.‖
―Where would he get that idea?‖
―A rival, possibly. I could find out for you,‖ Arkadin said helpfully.
―It doesn‘t matter,‖ Yevsen said. ―This Jason Bourne is already a dead man.‖
Exactly what I wanted to hear,Arkadin thought as he could not stop his mind from turning toward the past.
Approximately five hundred miles from Nizhny Tagil, when daylight had bled into dusk and dusk fell victim to night, Tarkanian drove toward the village of Yaransk to look for a doctor. He had stopped three times on the way, so everyone could relieve themselves and get a bite to eat. At those times, he checked on Oserov. The third stop, near sunset, he‘d found that Oserov had peed himself. He was feverish and looked like death.
During the long drive at high speed over incomplete highways, rough detours, and suspect roads, the children had been remarkably quiet, listening with rapt attention to their mother spin tales—fabulous adventures and magnificent exploits of the god of fire, the god of wind, and especially the warrior-god, Chumbulat.
Arkadin had never heard of these gods and wondered whether Joškar had made them up for her daughters‘ benefit. In any event, it wasn‘t just the three girls who were held rapt by the stories. Arkadin listened to them as if they were news reports from a distant country to which he longed to travel.
In this way, for him, if not for Tarkanian, the long day‘s journey into night passed with the swiftness of sleep.
They arrived in Yaransk too late to find a doctor‘s office open, so Tarkanian, asking several pedestrians, followed their directions to the local hospital. Arkadin was left with Joškar in the car. They both climbed out to stretch their legs, leaving the girls in the backseat, playing with the sets of painted wooden nesting dolls Arkadin had bought them during one of the rest stops.
Her head was partly turned away from him as she glanced back at her children. Shadows hid most of the damage done to her face, while the sodium lights drew out the exoticism of her features, which seemed to him a curious mixture of Asian and Finnish. Her eyes were large and slightly uptilted, her mouth was generous and full-lipped. Unlike her nose, which seemed formed to protect her face from life‘s tougher blows, her mouth exuded a sensuality bordering on the erotic. That she seemed quite unaware of this quality in herself made it all the more magnetic.
―Did you make up the stories you were telling your children?‖ he asked.
Joškar shook her head. ―I was told them when I was a little girl, looking out at the Volga. My mother was told them by her mother, and so on back in time.‖ She turned to him. ―They‘re tales of our religion. I‘m Mari, you see.‖
―Mari? I don‘t know it.‖
―My people are what researchers call Finno-Ugrik. We‘re what you Christians call pagans. We believe in many gods, the gods of the stories I tell, and the demi-gods who walk among us, disguised as humans.‖ When she turned her gaze on her girls something inexplicable happened to her face, as if she had become one of them, one of her own daughters. ―Once upon a time, we were eastern Finns, who over the years intermarried with wanderers from the south and east. Gradually, this mixture of Germanic and Asian cultures moved to the Volga, where our land was eventually incorporated into Russia.